~ Award Winning Dungeon Design

Magical Theorems & Dark Pacts

Magical Theorems & Dark Pacts is a 159-page book of material for Labyrinth Lord and classic 1981-era OSR spellcasters.

I’ve been talking about Magical Theorems & Dark Pacts for many years now. I started working on it in Open Office on my linux system back in 2009 and finally took the steps to make it into a book in the spring of 2013.

At heart, Magical Theorems & Dark Pacts is my revised rule book for Labyrinth Lord spellcasters. Emphasis on the word “my”. It reprints the Magic-User and Cleric (well, with a few minor tweaks that are hardly worth mentioning except the revised clerical turning undead table), and then piles on a bunch of other spellcasting classes along with their spell lists and spells. I also end up renaming the Magic-User as the Wizard because I use the term Magic-User as an umbrella for all arcane spellcasting classes.

Chapter 1 – Classes

Cleric (warrior-priests)

Wizard (classic magic-users with 10 levels of spells)

Elven Swordmage (elves from the core rules – arcane warriors)

Elven Warder (wilderness elves, guardians of their kin)

Enchanter (artists, con-men, and masters of… duh… enchantments)

Fleshcrafter (twisted magic-users that work with flesh)

Healer (compassionate and tough hearth-healers)

Inquisitor (ecclesiastic investigators and master intimidators)

Merchant Prince (elite merchants with spellcasting support)

Necromancer (you know exactly what these guys do)

Pact-Bound (magic-users who sell their souls for power)

Theurge (divine casters who learn from liturgical texts)

Unseen (thieves with an innate knack for magic)

Chapter 2 – Spells

All the spells for all these classes are included in the book – including reprinting all the core spells from Labyrinth Lord because just about every one of them can be cast by one or more of the new classes. But overall there is roughly a 100% increase in the number of spells available in this tome.

Chapter 3 – Magic Items

28 pages of new magic items generally aimed towards spellcasters (with a few sneak ones thrown in for the Unseen). I specifically avoided weapons and armour and put them into another file for a second book aimed towards fighters and thieves and other non spellcasting classes.

Chapter 4 – Creatures

Just a few monsters in this short chapter – one referenced earlier in the book and my rules for summoning / conjuring alternate types of elementals (wind, crystal, dungeon, wave, moss, thorn, smoke, zephyr and so on).

Finally there’s a short section on using this book with the Advanced Edition Companion. 99% of this book was written using only the core Labyrinth Lord rules without referencing the AEC at all, and therefore there are some suggestions for mixing these rules with the AEC ones – primarily adding AEC spells to the existing spell lists, and the revised hit dice for the various classes if using the optional AEC hit dice.

Labyrinth LordTM is copyright 2007-2011, Daniel Proctor. Labyrinth LordTM and Advanced Labyrinth LordTM are trademarks of Daniel Proctor. These trademarks are used under the Labyrinth LordTM Trademark License 1.2 available at http://www.goblinoidgames.com

Honestly, although I purchased this in book format, I’d prefer to have it as a PDF as well, EVEN THOUGH it’s all online.

Yes I understand your points that PDF isn’t just a blob of text, but I know how to add bookmarks and hotclicks to PDF files if I need them, and I don’t drag all my books to every session. Also having a volume condensed as a pdf is far more searchable than a collection of webpages.

If you have any interest, I’d be happy to add any number of these features to a PDF that you create, but obviously I’m not going to take on potentially reformatting them to ideally suit the medium.

My copy arrived. I really like having all the information in a hardbound book for the table (always good to have a small form-factor spell reference book) and can’t wait to try out some of the new Classes with my players.

I think I may have found a couple of errors, on page 34 under Spot Thievery it says see the table above for the checks roll and on page 35 for Spot Magic it also says see table above. The only table above is the spells per level table, nothing about rolling for spot checks.

I have a question regarding the necromancer class. I Love your book by the way, it will be the subject of a review on my blog site soon. Anyway on to the Necromancer question. It states in the description they start with 2 spells in their spellbook but at level 1 on the class chart it does not allow them to cast any spells. I understand they can have a million spells in a spellbook and not be able to cast them but what is the reasoning behind not allowing them to cast at level 1? I cannot find anything to explain it.